Best in show

Arab Health will bring together the biggest players in the global healthcare industry. Medical Times catches up with some of the key figures to find out what's in store for the 2008 event.

Scanning the horizon

Dr James Thrall is radiologist-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and will give the keynote address at the Imaging & Diagnostics Congress.

How do you see the use of magnetic resonance imaging expanding?

MRI is now being used in cancer diagnosis. For example, in prostate cancer it's possible to obtain highly detailed spectroscopy images to distinguish benign from malignant prostate tissue. This will be extremely valuable. There are some MRI enhancement agents - so-called contrast enhancement agents - that light up specific tissues that are targeted to important structures like lymph nodes. This is bringing MRI to the threshold of being used to determine whether a cancer has spread from where it started and to determine whether it has spread to the lymph nodes in the area.

What about PET/CT?

It's terrific, because positronic emission tomography and computed tomography combines metabolic information about what's occurring in a particular tissue with high-resolution anatomic information. Before we could put those two together, we couldn't say with a high degree of certainty that a particular metabolic abnormality was matched up with a specific structure in the body.

Information overdrive

Dr C. Martin Harris is chief information officer for the Cleveland Clinic and will be launching the foundation's ‘Virtual Visit' teleconsultation at Arab Health.

Can information technology transform the management of chronic disease?

Information technology must be a part of transforming the way we deliver healthcare services. We will not be able to afford to continue delivering healthcare in just the traditional mode of a physician's office or home healthcare facilities. The sheer number of people who will require services related to managing their chronic conditions demands that we dramatically improve the types of healthcare service we can deliver in alternative settings.

Is the IT-driven medical home likely to become a reality in the next five years?

The movement to deliver healthcare services virtually to the home is in full swing, and will include the capability to see, talk to, and examine a patient, as well as observe certain behaviours such as compliance with medication schedules and completion of necessary physical therapy activities. Although aspects of these virtual services and programmes can be seen in action today, I think that the fully functioning "medical home" will not be realised on a broad scale for perhaps a decade.

Soarian growth

Maurice Faber is director of Siemens Medical Solutions, NME region, one of the largest exhibitors at this year's congress.

What is your biggest growing market in the Middle East?

Siemens sees a major growth in the healthcare IT market, which we entered with our Soarian MedSuite HIS solution as well as our Syngo Suite solution. To be able to support our clients professionally we established a ‘centre of competence' with specialists for both solutions in the region. Another major growing market is the molecular imaging market. We will see a growing demand for PET/CT and SPECT/CT diagnoses which we will meet with our high resolution PET/CT.